Artificial Intelligence in Sales: Benefits and Possible Applications
Artificial intelligence holds great optimization potential for sales processes. Digitization generates enormous amounts of data, which in turn can be used with artificial intelligence to better understand customer needs and derive very specific recommendations for action for sales operations and strategy.
Implementing this in your business sales processes can be quite beneficial. You can hire a machine learning consulting service to guide or help you with the implementation. Let’s look at the benefits of AI in sales and its possible applications.
How is artificial intelligence used in sales?
Every company has a lot of data on products sold and sales information: With the use of AI in sales, you can use this to create forecasts that, for example, predict the future buying behavior of a customer or make a sales forecast for a specific point in time.
What are the areas of application of AI in sales?
Artificial intelligence can be used in sales in many areas. Let’s look at a few of them:
- Lead Scoring: By scoring leads based on their quality for the business, you can prioritize them in lead management. With AI, this is completely automated, reliable, and data-driven.
- Next Best Action: You can accurately predict the next best action using AI. It allows you to use multiple data related to the customer profile. The advantage: you receive a recommendation for action for each customer, for the right offer at the right time.
- Customer Lifetime Value: You want to know which of your customers will bring a long-term benefit to your company and treat them accordingly? AI will help you to find a reliable and valid Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
- Churn Prediction: Prevent unnecessary churn by having AI send you reactivation trigger alerts.
- Customer segmentation: Which customers can best be reached with which offer and on which channel?
- Opportunity Scoring/Closing Probabilities: AI can be used to calculate specific closing probabilities for opportunities and offers in a model.
What are the advantages of AI in sales?
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of AI in sales:
More time for important tasks
The most important advantage of using AI in sales processes lies in the gain in efficiency: By automating sales processes using AI and thus processing data using machine learning, you increase the efficiency of your employees. AI takes over the decision-making processes in a matter of seconds – and it’s data-supported.
Clear prioritization of tasks and leads
As the AI recognizes patterns and connections in the customer profiles, recommendations for action are passed on within seconds. For example, you can focus on the leads that have high conversion potential. At the same time, the next best action can be determined for each customer. Here, too, AI recognizes connections in the customer profiles and derives the interests and needs of the (as yet unknown) customer profiles from past transactions.
Targeted customer development
In the management of existing customers, many decisions have to be made to keep the customers and develop their value in a targeted manner. By identifying cross- and up-selling potential through AI, you gain efficiency.
Increase in cross-selling sales
To realize additional cross-selling sales in sales, you must first know which customers still have open cross-selling potential. This is exactly where artificial intelligence in sales comes in. Models can be specifically developed to predict possible, unused cross-selling potential.
This way, every sales employee has specific figures at their fingertips, from which they can read exactly how much potential is still open and where there are opportunities for cross-selling.
Increase in up-selling revenue
AI can be used to make special up-selling predictions, which serve as recommendations for action in sales to specifically develop customers and offer increasingly higher-priced products and services. This requires an analysis of previous purchases, and a prediction is made by artificial intelligence about the probability with which the company can make a special up-sell offer to this customer.
